The focus on effective altruism (e.g. quantitative optimization of QALYs) is fairly novel and not very similar to religious tithing or other historical donation behaviors.
In fact, very sincerely, giving charitable donations to ineffective causes like religious organizations, youth sports, “the arts”, is actively harmful, because of the opportunity cost of omitting the same donation to more effective charities.
For example each dollar donated to local youth soccer is exactly one dollar’s worth of malaria net protection or waterborne parasite protection denied to people around the world. Zero hyperbole.
It’s especially bad for something like youth sports where there is virtually zero potential for a dollar invested in it today to create returns that more than offset the competing opportunity of spending the same dollar today on e.g. malaria nets.
There’s just no effect of marginal sports donation, for example like helping a kid develop who then goes to college and invents some humanitarian technology or something. The chained probabilities and risks just render that sort of donation as pure waste in today’s terms.
It would quite literally be better to put that money into economic purchases rather than donations instead of wasting it on subjectively preferred charities.
In fact, very sincerely, giving charitable donations to ineffective causes like religious organizations, youth sports, “the arts”, is actively harmful, because of the opportunity cost of omitting the same donation to more effective charities.
For example each dollar donated to local youth soccer is exactly one dollar’s worth of malaria net protection or waterborne parasite protection denied to people around the world. Zero hyperbole.
It’s especially bad for something like youth sports where there is virtually zero potential for a dollar invested in it today to create returns that more than offset the competing opportunity of spending the same dollar today on e.g. malaria nets.
There’s just no effect of marginal sports donation, for example like helping a kid develop who then goes to college and invents some humanitarian technology or something. The chained probabilities and risks just render that sort of donation as pure waste in today’s terms.
It would quite literally be better to put that money into economic purchases rather than donations instead of wasting it on subjectively preferred charities.